


Paper Street

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Category: Fight Club (1999), Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-04
Updated: 2012-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-28 22:02:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/312628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before fight club evolves into Project Mayhem, there's a time of waiting, of watching to see where the chips will fall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paper Street

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LadyLuckDoubt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyLuckDoubt/gifts).



> _Fight Club_ characters belong first and foremost to Chuck Palahniuk, and in no way to me. I wasn't particularly trying to go for either movie or book canon here, so I've classed it as both.
> 
> Unbetaed, because I didn't know who to ask; concrit definitely welcome.
> 
> * * *

How the saying goes is that the house always wins. That’s what they say whenever some poor idiot offs themselves in Vegas, or even in some backroom dive in, I don’t know, Nebraska or somewhere, where they’re only playing nickel poker but the stakes are just too high. That’s the saying I thought of when I watched my condo burning, along with the one about only being free to do anything after you’ve lost everything. I don't know whether that one's real or just more of Tyler's bullshit, but then every saying has to have started somewhere. Why not with Tyler?

Bullshit homilies. They’re just words people throw out, sometimes to try to be comforting, and it sure as shit doesn’t work. I know. My job is to tell people what the chances are of someone dying in the risk scenario of the day. When your job is to calculate percentages like that, sayings mean nothing and gambling mere money means less.

How it should go is that the house always wins... in the end. The thing is, though, that the roulette ball can bounce against the turn of the wheel for a long time. The dealer can shuffle his cards for an eon. The dice can roll across the table for an ice age. Lady Luck can take her sweet time deciding how your life’s gonna turn out.

And, of course, you can let the chips fall where they may.

 

Before we had to worry about whether the wheel would land on red or black or double zero, while the ball was still bouncing, we had the house. It was a piece of shit. Tyler loved it. I just wondered whether the ceilings would cave in one night when he was fucking Marla. It sounded that way.

We had the house, and we had each other. Long conversations about who we’d fight. Tyler smoking wherever he wanted to because fuck it, it was our house and we didn’t have to explain the smell away to any nosy landlords. Or any nosy neighbors, because the nearest neighbors were uncaring factories. The house leaked when it rained. Sometimes it leaked when it wasn’t raining. The power was still on but wasn’t exactly something we could count on the power company coming out to fix when it stopped working. Standing there in a foot of water and screwing around with the circuit breakers was just another way of rolling the dice. I think everything was just too old and broken-down to care whether it killed anyone or not. It would have made a shitty haunted house.

The closest thing we had to a ghost was Marla. She drifted in and out in her bridesmaid’s dress and her tight jeans and whatever other outfit she’d pulled together that day. One time it was a toga she’d made from a curtain pulled down off the front windows, a curtain so moth-eaten and worn she might as well have been walking around naked. I told her this and she just snorted at me and then went to sit in the back yard where there were tomatoes growing wild, picking them and throwing them at the back fence.

The day she was watching _American Psycho_ on the crappy little television I’d set up and creaming herself over how hot Christian Bale was even when he was covered in blood, that was the day I decided that she had to be the house’s ghost, because otherwise the television would have blown itself up in disgust.

Another day I came home from work and she was swooping up and down the street in slow graceful loops on a pair of ancient roller skates. I had no idea where she’d found them, but the house had a lot of rooms and, considering that all three of us could be in there and manage to ignore each other if it really came down to it, maybe she’d found them in some kid’s room that we hadn’t discovered yet. Tomorrow she’d be playing with a dollhouse or singing lullabies from a long-forgotten book. It could be anything.

But despite our resident ghost, I started loving the house as well, because there wasn’t anywhere else to go. Tyler called me a fucking idiot, offered me a catalogue and told me to start picking out wallpaper patterns if I was going to get so fucking attached, and I pushed him down the stairs from the first floor into the front hallway, and then threw myself down after him.

It was one of Marla’s therapy nights (like every other night); it was also meant to be fight club night (also like practically every other night), but there were other people to worry about that. There were always other people. The space monkeys might not have been all lined up waiting for their turn in the rocket ship yet, but there were always people on hand to recite the rules of fight club, and to throw the first punch, and that was all that mattered.

That, and Tyler’s breath wheezing out in a mad laugh when I landed on him, and his racing pulse when I bit the side of his neck.

 

We ended up in the bed he and Marla usually shared. Call it a random card drawn from the deck. Besides, his room was closest to the stairs, when we eventually got back up them. By the top of the stairs his shirt was ripped to shreds and mine was hanging by a button.

The beaten old mattress felt familiar, and the smell of sex was as well, but it wasn’t a surprise; Tyler wasn’t the type to be big on housework, and the sheets probably hadn’t been changed since he moved in. Whenever he’d moved in. Sometime after the place had been condemned, was all I’d ever guessed.

I could see the mark on his neck where I’d bitten him while he dragged his jeans off, lazy and slow, and hurried him up with another bite to the chest just above his left nipple. It made me wonder what Marla was going to think when she saw it. I felt petty, but mostly I just hoped it would go some way toward exorcising her.

The only thing Tyler said, the only thing either of us said, was, “Hurry the fuck up, then.” He was staring at me like he couldn’t decide whether to fight me or fuck me.

In the end it was a little of both. He threw his shoes at me while I was trying to get my pants off, and then caught me off-balance, pants still around one ankle, sucking my cock into his mouth, his cheeks hollowing with the effort of it. His mouth slid off me with a wet noise and I fell on my ass. It was easier to just stay on the floor and finish dragging my pants off, and let him laugh at me from the bed.

The wheel was slowing down that night, but we didn’t know it yet. What we did know was another miserable fucking cliché, because lying there, forehead to forehead, chest to chest, hands wrapped around each other’s cocks in a different kind of fight, this one a race to get the other off first – impossible, because we knew each other’s reactions too well – it felt almost like we were the same person in two different bodies.


End file.
